


Through A Glass Darkly

by Graywand



Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: F/M, New Year's Eve, different surname for Paulina, new technologies, pressing social problems
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-23
Updated: 2015-11-23
Packaged: 2018-05-03 02:58:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5273897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Graywand/pseuds/Graywand
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's been a new world on the horizon ever since the Asteroid Crisis, and the Fenton's and their allies are the center of it. But this new world isn't going to come without costs: old enemies lurk in the shadows still, waiting for a chance to strike, and a new one has come. An alien race that automatically destroys any other race they consider a threat. And they're already here.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Through A Glass Darkly

“And I will show you something different from either  
Your shadow at morning striding behind you  
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;  
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

-T.S. Elliot, “The Waste Land”

 

Chapter One

 

Paulina Ortega sighed in irritation as she drove her red Ford Taurus down the road to Amity Park, resisting the urge to strangle the blonde numbskull currently buckled in to her passenger seat. _Be fair,_ the chastising thought flashed through Paulina’s brain, _Starr Corner is about as far from ‘blonde numbskull’ as a human being can get. She’s just…impulsive. Then again, so are you._ It was a bit hard, however, for her to maintain her objectivity when there was a throbbing bruise on her right cheek, and an ache in her ribs. “I’m going to kill you when we get home,” she muttered aloud

“Hey,” Starr muttered as she pressed an ice patch to the purple mass of her left eye, her face darkened in the shadow of the sun setting behind them, “That psychobitch ex-girlfriend of his showing up was _not_ part of the plan.”

“No,” Paulina snapped, shooting a quick glare at her. “But launching yourself at her when her sister and her friends are right there, ready to throw down?!”

“I had my best friend to back me up,” she shot back airily.

“We were outnumbered _three to one_ , and that’s if we include your date!” She cocked her head as she remembered the question she’d been meaning to ask her all day. “Speaking of which, where did you meet him anyway?”

Online

“Mother of God,” she muttered, resisting the urge to just check out, say, “Jesus take the wheel,” and pass out with her head on the steering wheel, the car’s horn blaring as they careened into oncoming traffic.

“What?” Starr said, shooting a glare at her. “It’s not like you don’t meet up with guys you met online. Besides, it’s not like _he’s_ the loon.”

“Ask me that when my ribs stop hurting,” Paulina muttered back, wincing slightly at a twinge of pain in her torso. Truth be told she was right. She did meet up with guys she met online. Her last date had ended with the two of them in his car, with no complaints all around so she wasn’t totally opposed to the concept. But this incident exemplified the downsides of online dating,

Even so, Starr _did_ have a point. Considering the fullest extent of the downsides, written in blood and pain and shattered lives, an angry ex showing up (that he had, truth be told, been upfront about) was far from the worst possible outcome of a date with someone you met online.

Which didn’t do much at all to ease the pain in her ribcage and the massive bruise purpling on her right cheek, and the fact that they were now driving home in what was rapidly approaching after dark, which they were still two young to do. She checked the dial on her speedometer, making sure they were driving well below the speed limit. The last thing she needed was to be pulled over by police _now._ She just wanted to drop Starr off, go home, and crawl into bed for the night.

She’d barely finished the thought when she felt herself pitch forward slightly as her car abruptly lurched before it began to bleed of momentum. _Oh, great,_ she thought sullenly, _what now?_

She pulled her car over in front of a wheat field before it came to a halt entirely.

Paulina sighed, popping the hood before getting out of the car to look over the engine block, hoping to see whatever was causing the problem before she was noticed by say a police cruiser.

She saw nothing. Nothing she could see at least. Which meant it was probably the battery, and since spares were dangerous to lug around, she didn’t have one on hand. She sighed anxiously. She was going to have to call a tow truck and risk the uncomfortable questions that would almost certainly end with her hauled before a judge to have her license suspended.

“Well?” Starr asked, her head sticking out the passenger side window.

"I can’t see anything wrong, Starr, I’m going to have to call AAA,” Paulina said resignedly, shoving her hand into her pocket and grasping the cool plastic of her phone.

 “Wait, Polly,” Starr said, getting out of the car, and walking over to her, a resigned look on her face. “I’ll call. And pay for it. If our age comes up I’ll say I was the one driving.”

The sheer generosity in that statement struck her like a blow to the stomach. “Are-are you sure?”  
“Hey,” Starr said, a wan smile on her face. “It’s the least I can do. And besides, I don’t have a car to begin with so it’s not going to be too disruptive if they suspend my license.”

“But Starr-,” Paulina began plaintively, she refused to let Starr take the fall for her actions.

“Enough, Polly,” Starr said, her voice hardening as she pulled her phone out of her pocket. “I’m doing it.”

Starr had just brought the phone up and was beginning to dial the number for roadside assistance when a bright light flared to life over her head. The two women’s screams cut through the air, squeezing her eyes shut against the blinding, painful strobe. She felt a sharp tingling sensation running down the length of her spine.

The last sensation she felt before oblivion took her was the feeling that her entire body had been yanked off the ground.

* * *

 

Paulina didn’t know how long she’d been floating in darkness before her body jerked as she felt something sticking into her back. She squinted and rolled over to find a more comfortable position, only to find herself with a rock pressing sharply into her bruised ribs. She winced, eyes bursting open at the sharp pain.

To see her staring at a moonlit wheat field, the stalks blowing gently in the evening breeze.

 _What?_ She thought, as she scrambled to her feet, the memory of what had happened flooding back to her, at least partially. _I remember Starr pulling out her phone, then that bright light, and that’s it._ Her breath hitched as she realized she couldn’t see Starr.

“Starr?” She called out, casting about wildly for any sign of her friend as fear ran down her spine.

No one answered; there were only the loud, insistent chirp of crickets, and the cool breeze blowing up through the south, susurrating through the wheat field.

“Starr?!” She shouted again, alarmed, propping up on her shoulders, and jerking her head around, frantically scanning for any sign of her friend in the moonless night

Then she saw it, the unmistakable silhouette of an adult female human lying spread-eagled on the ground.

She scrambled to her feet and darted for her car, yanking out the flashlight and first aid kit she kept under the passenger side seat at all times. She clicked the yellow, heavy-duty flashlight on, the pale blue light LED shining out over the green-brown ground.

Her heart leapt into her throat at the unmistakable sight of her best friend lying face down by the side of the road, her blonde hair flowing out like a blanket

She ran forward, kneeling down and pulling Starr over on her front, breathing a sigh of relief when she started blinking her green eyes in surprise.

“Whathellhappen?” her best friend muttered, eyes staring off into space.

Paulina needed to snap her friend out of her delirium. “Can you walk?” Paulina asked in her best cheer captain voice, as though they were on the practice field and she needed to get her people into formation. She and Starr had been cheerleaders for years, and as a result, taking orders in a high-pressure situation was as natural as breathing.

Starr’s eyes refocused on her immediately and she nodded firmly, and Paulina held out her hand.    “What the hell happened?” She repeated clearer this time, though there was a distinct waver of shock in her voice after she grabbed her hand and pulled herself off the ground,

“I don’t know. But we should get probably get out of here.”

“I agree,” Starr said and the two women rushed back to their cars, fear driving them forward as they tore the doors on either side open and scrambled inside. A moment of terrified fumbling with the car keys later, she breathed a sigh of stunned relief as her car flared to life. She slammed on the gas, barreling down the road as fast as they could.

“What do we do?” Starr asked her voice wavering further as they tore down the road. The clocks on their phones had been frozen for thirty seconds on the time it’d been when they’d had to pull over, 6:30 before switching over to the actual time. 9:00.

There was a blank space in their memories of two and a half hours that neither of them could account for at all.

 "I don’t know,” Paulina blurted out, a lump forming in her throat. “I don’t know,” _What the hell happened out there? One second Starr was about to call for a tow, the next we’re lying unconscious in the middle of the road and I don’t for the life of me know how the hell we got there?!_

“I don’t think we should go home tonight,” Starr said, breathing heavily. “At least not right away. Thank God both of our families are out of town. You couldn’t pay me to try to explain this to them right now. Look, there’s only one group of people who know how to deal with something like this, you know who we’ve got to see.”

“Yeah,” Paulina said, sighing, that very thought had been in the back of her mind the past few minutes.  “Yeah I know.”

“He’s going to be pissed at us, no doubt,” Starr continued. “So will Sam. But we have no choice. We need to know what happened, and they’re the only two people we know who can even begin to help us. Besides, now that we’ve had a…massive dose of reality,” Starr said, an interesting euphemism for a massive Texas-sized asteroid that nearly wiped out their planet. “I think he’ll help us anyway, that’s just who he is.”

“I know,” Paulina responded after a moment, guilt stabbing at her along with the tingling. Facing the end of their lives and the lives of every other human being in existence had forced her and a lot of other people she knew to look at themselves in the mirror. And while she couldn’t speak for all of her peers, she and Starr had recoiled in disgust from what they saw: two selfish, vapid little girls who thought that their social status in a high school career that was due to be take away from them in, well, a year now, was the end all and be all of human existence. Only to have the real world intrude on it in a very rude, very violent way they could no longer simply ignore as someone else’s problem, and made it very clear that that world was very much easier to destroy than they thought. And that it wasn’t people like her who were the only people worth menti

“All right, we’ll go see him.”

“Tonight?”

Paulina sighed. “Tonight.”

 

* * *

 

Daniel Fenton pushed open the door to the master bedroom at FentonWorks as he and Sam walked into what was now their room. It was there date night, and they’d just got back from a trip to the Nasty Burger.

He walked over to the shorter girl, eyes drinking her in. The five foot two young woman was thin, with black hair and iridescent blue eyes that flashed purple in certain lights, that he’d always enjoyed losing himself in whenever possible. She was frequently thought of as scrawny and boyish due to being her height, slimness, and lack of chest

 _Those people were idiots_ , he thought, smiling with unabashed lust and pride at his lover. Everyone else’s superficial appraisal of her ended when they got to the Goth look and the combat boots, but not his. She _was_ naturally thin yes, but she was also physically fit, with a toned, shapely figure, especially in her legs and hips that her lack of chest actually complimented, not detracted from.

Sam walked over, deliberately swaying her hips in an attempt to get his attention before wrapping her arms around his neck.          

“You seem distracted,” she said, shooting him a concerned look.

“Just thinking about us,” Danny responded with a smile of his own, wrapping his arms around her waist, “and how we got here.”

“It’s been a hell of a ride,” she said, smiling.

Danny smirked. “To think, your father thinks I’m almost respectable these days.”

“Your parent’s company’s changing the world, Danny,” Sam said. “It’s still very early days, but anyone with a functioning brainstem and even a modicum of sense can see the changes coming already.”

 The fact that the research and development his parents had been pursuing in their all but single-minded devotion to studying ghosts had had applications outside the field of ghost hunting had been obvious to everyone except his parents.  And after the Asteroid Incident, they’d been perfectly happy to go right back to the status quo… for about five minutes, until the status quo changed forever.

 Not so much as it came to his secret identity. Everyone at McMurdo Station who’d become aware of his secret identity had been sworn to secrecy, and his identity had been classified top secret as per section 11C-9 of the National Security Act of 1947. And, or so he’d been told, compartmentalized in such a way that not even the Director of the Ecto Control Agency,  disparagingly known as the Guys in White, didn’t have clearance for that information without approval from the Director of National Intelligence, under whose jurisdiction the ECA fell.

 And given that they’ve been coming under increasing fire for their methods, with two bills calling for their outright dissolution (something that as far as he was concerned, couldn’t come fast enough) in the House and one in the Senate, that approval wasn’t likely coming in the foreseeable future.

The other changes coming also couldn’t come fast enough. He, his sister Jazz, Sam, and Tucker had cornered his parents and convinced them to actually start exploring, and marketing, the other applications to come out of their ghost research;tions that had the potential to affect virtually every aspect of the human condition. The quantum leap in bioengineering that had gone into Vlad’s cloning technology could be, under ethical conditions this time, repurposed to allow cloning of organs and limbs for transplants, for exampl

And that was just the tip of the iceberg.

In their single-minded devotion to studying ghosts and/or destroying their enemies, the Fentons and Vlad between them had managed to develop the technologies between them to reach the holy grail of human exploration and achievement. Practical, large-scale space travel that could give mankind access to the resources of it’s own solar system. Where there were resources enough to sustain the new spacefaring civilization on the horizon and lift billions of people out of poverty.

Also, there was enough space out, in well, space to build anything. Aside from spacecraft, it would do wonders for the _non-_ controversial aspects of environmental preservation to move most major extractive and manufacturing industries into space within the next ten to fifteen years, which analysts were already predicting.

There was a new world on the horizon. And his parents were at the forefront of it. They couldn’t do everything of course. They’d let other companies purchase the IP’s for Vlad’s innovations in biomedicine, for example. FentonWorks, with a generous loan from Sam, had taken on the aeronautics weapons manufacturing, and engineering side of things. Which were already making dividends and improving at least his father’s view of their family.

Sam’s mother however, was not. Pamela Manson was convinced that her daughter’s preferences,” both in clothing and mate, weren’t “respectable,” would destroy her reputation and theirs, and that her best bet to secure her future was to adopt brighter clothing, adopt a “normal” career path that wouldn’t look bad, and preferably find a “normal” partner while she was at it.  She wasn’t an evil woman, by any standard, and she really _was_ doing what she thought was best for the daughter she genuinely loved.

No, the main problem was that Pamela Manson was what was steadily approaching an anachronism in most wealthy families of the late twentieth to twenty-first centuries: a wealthy magnate’s wife who had no part in the running of the family business. Not because her husband was a misogynist, far from it, but simply because she had no experience or training sufficient to play any role beyond political hostess. The trend was for both partners in a marriage to be wealthy businessmen and women, even if they had completely separate businesses. Even if they’d had completely separate businesses, they would have found the common ground enough to at least respect her daughter’s work ethic, and skill in her area of expertise, even if they disagreed with the career path in question. It was that which had bridged much of the common ground between her and her father.

Not Mrs. Manson. She had grown up at the tail end of that age where the women in wealthy families were expected to be little more than house managers and political hostesses, and she’d accepted and genuinely looked forward to that role in life. It didn’t make her _weak_ by any means. Sam got much of her personality in large part from her mother, but it didn’t make relations between them any easier. More than that, it also proved the old saw that “morality binds and _blinds_.” She was as ideologically blinkered in her own way as her daughter had been.

Frequently, interactions between them also proved another old saw: The one about what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable objec

“Not that I give a damn what anyone else thinks about you,” Sam said, smiling, and wrapping her arms around his neck, drawing him out of his worried musings about Sam’s relationship with her family. “Now,” she said suggestively, “why don’t you take me to bed and do with your hands what you were doing with your eyes all afternoon during lunch.”

Danny smiled, pulling Sam deeper into his powerful embrace, lifting her off the ground by the waist and prying her lips apart with his tongue. Sam’s moans rang in his ears and he smiled against her lips as her legs wrapped around his waist as he guided them towards the bed.

* * *

 

  _Sam stood in the FentonWorks basement, bathed in the green light of the ghost portal. She felt alive. More alive than she’d ever felt._ I can finally do what I want, _she thought._ I can finally remake the world, make it better. Once those frail weak nothings that I used to naively call my people are finally all dealt with. And to think I once wanted to _help_ those short-sighted reactionary fuckers, _she thought. Fools. They were fools all of them; fools who kept killing their own world, poisoning their bodies, and grinding under their fellow men. Fools. Who clung to their short- sighted antiquated beliefs despite an objectively better way before them._ Plants really are better than people, _she thought._ Branches don’t tear leaves off one another, roots don’t hoard water from the trunk. They grow together in a harmonious whole. _It’s about time they_ all _were fed to plants._

 _Except one_. _The boy, the_ man _, floating in front of the portal about to run away from her forever. She felt her legs weaken._ No, _she thought desperately, pain as such she’d never felt before burning like fire through her veins. She had an entire world to remake. She needed him by her side to help do it._

_Stay, Danny. Stay and rule with me.”_

Sam’s eyes flew open, and she found herself staring up at the brown oak ceiling. She felt her dry tongue in her mouth as she took stock of her situation. Her hair was tousled, all her clothes had been stripped away and she was enveloped in her exhausted lover’s arms. She should be feeling great, but she wasn’t. Not anymore. Even the warm feel of Danny’s powerful arms around her waist didn’t do much to dispel the self-loathing that settled into her bones like a thick black cloud at times. Especially at night. When she’d wake up and stare at the ceiling, as the memories of that black day when she’d cast aside everything she’d ever claimed to believe in and betrayed her own race.

She felt Danny stir against her. “How long have you been awake?”

“Oh, not long,” Sam responded. She looked out the window. The setting sun outside was throwing shadows in their bedroom. What had once been Jack and Maddie’s bedroom until they’d moved into a suite of rooms above Axion Labs to work on the Hephaistos orbital project, FentonWorks proof of concept that it was in fact feasible to move industrial manufacturing into orbit. Laying the groundwork, to say nothing of the actual construction, would occupy their time for the foreseeable future, so they’d given their newly emancipated (for their role in the Asteroid Crisis) son the lease on their house, and let (the also newly-emancipated) Sam move in with him.

She closed her eyes, tensing under Danny’s arms at the pain that flooded through her. There was a new future on the horizon that promised to solve all the problems that she’d been agitating against ever since she was old enough to at least begin to understand the concepts involved.

And she’d come unthinkably close to exterminating her own kind before they could take those first steps into a new frontier. _You either die a hero,_ _or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain._

“What’s wrong?” Danny asked from next to her.

“Nothing,” Sam said, and pushing herself even further back into her bed.

“Sam,” Danny said dangerously. “You can’t fool me. What’s wrong?

“I dreamed I was Undergrowth’s apprentice again. That you were about to escape into the Ghost Zone, and I was demanding that you stay to rule with me over a world flensed of human life,” she said, voice filled with bitter self-loathing.

“You weren’t yourself,” Danny said sympathetically, “You were under Undergrowth’s control.”

“This isn’t _Star Trek: The Next Generation,_ Danny, and I wasn’t Locutus.” Sam responded harshly. “There was no hive mind to control my actions. I was his _apprentice_ , not his puppet.”

Danny’s arms withdrew from her waist and Sam turned to look at him, to be greeted with a disbelieving stare.

“You couldn’t have _wanted_ to be doing everything you did,” Danny said very carefully.

“He messed with my inhibitions, yes,” Sam responded. “But _I_ was in control of my actions. He offered me the chance to have the world on a silver platter and I took it. All I could think in that moment was, finally, I had the chance to remake the world. In that moment I was so angry at the human race, a race that seems committed to destroying it’s own environment…and I decided to destroy that race in turn, God forgive me. 

"You wouldn’t have made that decision under normal circumstances,” Danny pointed out, “you said it yourself, your inhibitions were gone.”

“Maybe so,” she said after a moment, “but when I was back to normal, I thought long and hard, about precisely _why_ I was chosen to destroy humanity for him. He chose me for a reason, Danny, and not just because I love plants. But because I had the two most dangerous things in any person. I wanted everyone to tow my line and I was a radical extremist, who genuinely believed that everyone who disagreed was not simply wrong, or had a different beliefs than I do, but were actively aggressive against innocent victims. That if I could just stop them from spewing their lies, the people would wake up to how they’d been used and sign on with me,” she said with a bitter laugh. “It was only a short trip from seeing everyone who disagreed with me as monsters in human skin to seeing _everyone_ as monsters.”

“It’s not all bad. Needing to be in control and the ability to make people do what you want, for all their negative aspects, are the traits of good leaders,” Danny pointed out. “And you _are_ a good leader.”

“Who nearly ended human existence in a fit of pique,” Sam growled, squeezing her eyes, at the tears that were welling up inside her.  “My God. I almost _murdered_ everyone I ever loved, and I _wanted to do it_.” Her tears began to run down her cheeks and she felt Danny’s eyes arms envelop her and pull her into his embrace. She leaned and began to cry into his bare shoulder.

“You’re not a monster, Sam. You’ve never been, not even then. I happened to think you needed to learn to respect other’s opinions, but you’ve learned that lesson well.”

She pulled from his embrace and looked at her boyfriend, as the thought that flitted in and out of Sam’s mind like this flowed around.

“Have you ever read _Mein_ _Kampf_ , Danny?” She said after a long moment, referring to Hitler’s infamous ranting, anti-Semitic “autobiography.”

“No,” Danny said quizzically, “can’t say that I particularly want to either. Why?”

“People should read it,” Sam responded, “if only to get a glimpse of truly evil,” she said. “At any rate, there’s a line where he’s talking about the ‘Jewish threat,’” she said with all the scorn that concept deserved. “Basically he said that Jews aren’t human and that if the ‘Jew triumphs, then his crown of victory will be the funeral wreath of the human species.’ That Earth will ‘once again wing its way through the universe entirely without humans, as was the case millions of years ago,’ and those are direct quotes by the way.” She sighed, closing her eyes again, “And there I was, a young Jewish woman, proving his point.”

"That’s ridiculous, Sam,” Danny said, sharply, his voice hardening. “Most people don’t even _remember_ what happened at all. Much less know you were involved and decide to use your actions when you weren’t of sound mind to justify bigotry.”

“True,” Sam said, “but that’s just the thing. The operative word here is ‘most.’ I’m quite sure that there are more than a few people besides myself who’s memory of what happened as since resurfaced.’ And while I’m sure that most of them who remember enough and know enough are willing to settle for blaming me alone, you and I both know that there’s a good chance that there’s at least one person out there who isn’t.” _And you and I both know that ‘of sound mind’ is a subjective term, that’s not going to convince everybody if my role in those events_ does _become generally known._

Silence descended on the room, as the implications of what she just said settled over them.

The silence between them was broken as the sounds of a fist rapping on the door exploded through the house in sharp bursts.

Danny rolled out of bed, pulled on his bathrobe and walked over to the window. “It’s Paulina and Starr,” he said, surprised.The incongruity of Paulina and Starr showing up stunned her out of her reverie, and Sam was pulling on her own bathrobe as she she walked over to the window to see for herself. Sure enough Paulina and Starr were standing on the porch. The five foot ten black-haired young woman and her equally tall blonde friend were standing on her porch.  _And they looked beat up,_ she noted, concerned almost despite herself. Even in the dull yellow-orange of the street lights, she could see the massive bruise on Paulina’s right cheek, and that Starr had a massive black eye. And that they were terrified: they kept staring around them, as though they were expecting someone to jump them.

 _Or someone_ else _,_ she said, sighing, her concern mounting. She and Danny looked at each other before Danny nodded and raised his fist to the window, rapping on it gently to get their attenti

“Just a minute,” he shouted when they darted up to look at the stairs, before the two of them hastily collected and put back on their street clothes

Three minutes later a hastily dressed Sam and Danny were rushing down the stairs. Danny crossed over to the door and opened it up to reveal a disheveled Paulina and Starr looking at them with unabashed relief

 “Thank God,” Paulina started in immediately, voice trembling with barely suppressed fear mixed with relief. “We need your help.”

“What happened?” Sam asked, walking over to stand next to her boyfriend.

 Paulina sighed. “That’s just it. We don’t really know.”

 

          

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: I decided to put in the discourse about Mein Kampf because of a course I took about the Holocaust during the Spring semester. My very first document analysis for that course was an analysis of those first couple chapters of Mein Kampf where Hitler lays out the reasons for his conversion to fanatical anti-Semitism. I was writing another story at the time, so this particular thing didn't occur to me at the time. Then the realization hit me as I was thinking about the events of "Urban Jungle" for this story. While I don't for the moment believe that's what either Butch Hartman or Wincat Alcala were aiming for in the slightest, they wanted to tell a story about a plant monster that brainwashes someone and she was the natural choice due to her established love of plants, the implications are there if you think about them long enough. And they'd occur to Sam too in universe. Also, this isn't just a random philosophical musing on their part, the personal repercussions for Sam of that incident, and an exploration of the very real and disturbing rise of antisemitism in North America and Europe, are a key subplot in this story. I know I'm going to have to handle that aspect of the story very carefully, but it's something that needs to be explored.
> 
> Now that I've said that, good luck all your readers out there and have a Happy Thanksgiving.
> 
> Also, Paulina's surname is fanon, so I figured I could use a surname that I personally prefer


End file.
